‘Cloud computing already has a bigger footprint than the aviation industry,’ warns Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Matt Harris.
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00:00 The cloud industry consumes more power and has a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation industry.
00:05 As a society, we are naturally hoarders. 30% of their cloud bill is wasted.
00:10 Welcome to the Big Question, the series from Euronews where we speak to some of the brightest
00:20 minds in industry to address the key topics on the business agenda. Today, we're speaking to
00:25 Matt Harris, a Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I want to
00:29 talk to you today about the cloud. It's something that we all knowingly and maybe sometimes
00:33 unknowingly use every day. So to start us off broadly, can you estimate in Europe, we'll say,
00:38 how much money companies are wasting by misusing the cloud? Well, that's a really difficult
00:43 one to quantify, Hannah. I think if you look at some of the stats that are out there,
00:47 we predict in 2024, the cloud spending will surpass the trillion dollar mark in Europe.
00:54 I think, again, depending on the reports you look at per annum, customers and enterprises
01:01 spending anywhere between 150 to 200 billion dollars a year. How much is wastage? Again,
01:07 very difficult. Some reports would say we've got customers who say that 30% of their cloud bill
01:13 is wastage or they don't know what it's used for. And even if we're half right on that,
01:18 it is a sizable and significant number. Why or how is the cloud being misused? And, you know,
01:29 what are the common misconceptions around it? Well, I think in enterprises, in businesses,
01:34 we have for the last decade been living in this cloud first policy. Conventional wisdom will say
01:42 that the cloud is outsourcing a lot of your IT obligations of running your enterprise or
01:48 storing your information. So if you think about it from your phone, you know, a lot of the pictures
01:53 that you have on your phone are backed up into the cloud. What does that mean? That means that
01:59 they are stored on someone else's hard drive, but you still have the ability to get those back.
02:06 But they also come with a cost because they will fundamentally sit on large bits of technology
02:12 managed by someone else. The cloud undoubtedly gave a huge amount of business benefit in terms of
02:18 how organizations brought new products to market in a digitized route much more quickly.
02:24 But some of those kind of abundance of an ease of consumption of cloud also had a lot of drawbacks
02:31 as well, which are only now really being understood by customers. You know, there is still a huge
02:37 a cost associated with it. There is a sustainability aspect to it because all of those
02:42 IT assets are very intensive in terms of the energy that they consume.
02:47 I think some people have discussed kind of the rising costs of the cloud. How much have
02:58 costs risen, say, in the past two years and what has contributed to that rising cost?
03:03 Well, I think a few things there. I don't meet any enterprise who hasn't
03:07 encountered what we call bill shock, where they get to the end of the month for a period.
03:12 They see their cloud bill and think that is far bigger than I had anticipated.
03:17 And I think it comes to a little bit of human behavior when you've got
03:22 an abundance of resource, when you can't see it, when it's not within your control to
03:27 manage that and it's really easy to consume, your consumers use it and use it and use it more.
03:32 And therefore, we have seen spiraling costs. If I go back to a personal example,
03:39 you know, it is probably every four or five months from my telephone provider that says,
03:46 do you want to increase your storage capacity because you still aren't deleting photos, Matt?
03:52 And that's not what I thought the cost was going to be at the start.
03:55 The reality is if you do that at super scale as a business over a long period of time,
04:01 it has created enormous bill. So further to that point,
04:05 how can businesses save money on their cloud usage?
04:10 I mean, as a society, we are naturally hoarders. You know, we like to have comfort in keeping
04:17 things. It gives us a degree of safety. The reality around that, if you think about data
04:23 and what as businesses, as consumers, we're storing, do you need 32 copies of something
04:30 which is not necessarily hugely valuable? We have historically kept things for
04:37 tens of years, decades, you know, 50 years. And the reality is, does that information
04:43 require us to continue to hold it? So what we fundamentally see is with our hoarding nature,
04:49 that we aren't deleting anything. We aren't necessarily in control of that.
04:53 We think it's a really good time for every organization to re-evaluate their cloud strategy
04:58 and start with the end state and goal. Start with what have we learned through
05:03 the period of the last decade? What do we believe our IT spend and requirements
05:08 going to be for the next decade, particularly with things like artificial intelligence?
05:12 And where is the best location to invest in technology that supports our business?
05:18 It's making sure, particularly around data management and storage, we are taking costs
05:22 out of things and not storing them and evaluating with a much more conscientious approach what our
05:29 future strategy should be. You know, you were saying about how we need
05:38 to be more conscientious about what we store. We can't keep every single, we can't keep the
05:42 thousands of holiday photos that we all take. If we don't do so on a business level, we can't keep
05:48 every little document, every email, you know, we need to be better with our data. If we don't do
05:54 something about managing our data and what we store, how will that amass and what will be the
06:00 consequence? The cloud industry consumes more power and has a bigger carbon footprint than
06:05 the aviation industry. That's today. Tomorrow, it's going to be even bigger than that.
06:12 As our thirst for quicker, faster, more information grows and grows. The reality is,
06:18 if you are not storing data locally, there's this kind of out of sight, out of mind mantra that we
06:25 have as human beings. And by doing that, we can rely on cloud providers to try and reduce data
06:34 and minimize our cost or wanting to store things. But let's be really frank, that's not how they
06:40 monetize their business. So they are therefore not necessarily motivated to do that. So what do
06:48 we need to do? We need to be very aware of that. We need to think about the decisions, long term to
06:55 the planet, not just how our businesses perform on every IT decision we make. Because if you fast
07:02 forward 10 years from now, again, the role IT will have on society, on business, on consumer will only
07:09 get greater. And therefore, we all play a pivotal part in terms of the impact of that to our futures
07:17 and the future generations of people we have on this planet. AI as an example, the way that AI
07:22 works is even hungrier than our classic data storage and enterprise workloads that sit on
07:29 clouds today. And in fact, if you ran AI workloads into our classic cloud models we have today,
07:36 they'd be wildly inefficient. So if we're not conscious and conscientious of how we build,
07:42 how we consume, what we delete, the output of those, then we are going to get to some
07:48 astronomical wastage figures, which is really scary for all of us. To that kind of sustainability
07:53 angle, do you think businesses, if they don't do something about their data storage, do you
08:01 think they can really achieve environmental targets? I think, candidly, no. I think going
08:07 back to some of the contribution that IT and the cloud have on our carbon emissions and our
08:15 footprint we leave on the planet, without getting control of that, we will not be able to deliver
08:21 against our sustainability targets. The problem is only getting bigger and worse, not better.
08:27 And those that are not taking action now, are not rethinking with a much more conscientious approach
08:34 and reviewing all elements of a strategy, are going to be the ones that either don't deliver,
08:40 or actually from a business perspective, get left behind.
08:43 So the cloud has changed the way we work. And now obviously AI is kind of the hot topic and
08:55 is really going to change our lives going forward. We've established that the way the cloud works and
09:01 how it's used is very misunderstood. What can we learn from our misunderstanding of the cloud,
09:05 so we don't make mistakes with AI going forward? I mean, AI has burst into our lives. The reality of
09:13 it is AI is a very compute and storage intensive, what we call workload, and therefore will have a
09:23 huge draw of power to drive forward, which has a huge impact to the carbon tons that,
09:30 you know, will be emitted. We have to be considered and conscientious about how we
09:37 get the benefits of AI, but really understand the drawbacks to the future of our planet.
09:43 I think what we can't afford to do is follow that abundance mentality, that
09:51 carefree attitude of, "I will just consume as much as I can because I'm in a race to get this new
09:57 thing to market." Because if we had done that, if we kind of rewind the clock and say AI was the
10:03 thing 10 years ago and not the cloud, the scale of the problem we'd have now around cost, the impact
10:10 to the planet, how control over the future would be, you know, huge, huge times, you know, much
10:17 more scarier for what we'd be trying to work out in the future. So I think something that is on a
10:28 lot of people's minds when they think about the cloud is, is our data safe in the cloud? You know,
10:34 for example, is it easier to hack in or to access data that's stored in the cloud over data that
10:41 would be, say, stored on-premises on a hard drive? That's almost an impossible question to answer.
10:47 What I would say is regardless of where your data resides, if you're in control of it in your own
10:51 data center, where you've kind of outsourced where that resides into a public cloud, it is still your
10:58 obligation and responsibility to secure it. And it's therefore not out of sight and out of mind.
11:04 We see in the press all the time an increase in ransomware, cyber security attacks and threats.
11:12 That is only going to continue over time. What we would encourage organizations to do is understand
11:20 that regardless of their decision around their cloud strategy or where their data resides, that
11:25 they are obligated and still need to make sure they're going through the appropriate
11:29 protocols to ensure that is safe, to ensure that they have the right remediation strategies
11:37 to prevent those sorts of attacks. I'm thinking kind of about, you know,
11:40 if there was a disruption, what would be the consequences, hypothetically,
11:45 if the cloud went down for a day within Europe? What would be the consequences for business?
11:49 I mean, hard to quantify. I think reality is cloud is pervasive and part of all of our lives.
11:57 And even if you're an organization or you are a consumer, is not using the cloud, you know,
12:05 directly, you probably rely on a service which could be hosted in a cloud provider or that
12:12 service may rely on a third party which is hosted in that provider.
12:16 I think it is almost inconceivable to think about the chaos that that could create.
12:22 And let's all hope that doesn't happen. And so looking to the future, do you think
12:27 the cloud is going to continue to be one of our main storage techniques, I guess?
12:33 And if so, or if it isn't, you know, is there going to be a day where we're suddenly just
12:38 cut off from from our data that's stored there? Yeah, the cloud will be here forever.
12:42 I think what will change is the definition of it. I think we will see the cloud move from this kind
12:48 of looking to the sky vaporware to a much more well understood. This is a methodology
12:56 that I need to deploy regardless of my data resides. And we will need a cloud approach to
13:04 that, which is, you know, operating very efficiently, only paying for what you use,
13:09 only storing what you really need. And we have to have that approach anywhere.
13:14 So I think the definition changes, rather than we see a shift,
13:18 because the cloud is here to stay for all of us.
13:21 Thank you very much. And thank you so much for joining us on the question.
13:29 [BLANK_AUDIO]